→ August 25, 2026
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The Anniversary.

What if each unhappy family is, in practice, unhappy in fundamentally the same way? Can you reduce all familial unhappiness to a simple formula of cruelty, alienation, and poor boundaries?

Andrea Bajani presents us with one very unhappy family in The Anniversary, refusing to even name his characters, as the now-adult son of the family marks ten years since he last spoke to either of his parents. He retells their story and his in sparse but significant terms, painting the picture of a marriage marked by power, control, terror, and maybe even violence, but in a voice that allows the narrator to examine his own feelings through two lenses, how he felt at the time and how he feels now with the benefit of time and distance.

The narrator’s father is the obvious villain in the story, as he is cut from similar cloth to David Melrose in Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose novels and Sam Pollit in Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, terrorizing first his wife and then his entire family with his outbursts, his vicious tongue, and later his delusions, like believing he’s capable of giving his enemies cancer through his mental powers. The narrator begins with his parents meeting, telling how his mother was actually the more educated one, heading to university when her husband-to-be dropped out of high school, dreaming of a job as a teacher while he had to take a sales job because it was all that was available to him. He compensated for this power imbalance by taking her down through his words, eventually pressuring her into abandoning her studies and her hopes of a career so she could be first his servile housewife and later a stay-at-home mother to the two children they would have in quick succession after marrying. The husband set a perimeter around his wife and tightened it slowly over time, limiting her contact with her own parents, then her friends, and eventually isolating her almost completely in their apartment until the children were nearly grown.

The narrator was a witness to much of this behavior, but did little to stop it or push back until he was much older, and even in early adulthood remained obsequious to his domineering father and cipher mother, still largely obeying his father’s wishes or orders well into his 30s. His slightly older sister, from whom he is also estranged, although less strictly so, couldn’t get out of that environment quickly enough; there’s much less on their relationship, but it is clear from the hints Bajani drops that it’s also quite complicated, with resentment in both directions, her willingness to protect him somewhat as a child turning into disdain for his obeisance to their father in adulthood.

Part of the spell that The Anniversary casts comes from Bajani’s use of small moments in conversation to stand in for the giant breakpoints you might expect given that the narrator tells us in the first chapter that he has cut ties with his parents. There is, in fact, one almost-certain story of physical abuse here, but it isn’t an impetus for anything – in fact, the perpetrator ends up forgiving the victim in a perversion of the normal order of things, further underscoring how skewed these internal relationships are. Every time there’s a large shift in any of those relationships, husband to wife, husband to son, or wife to son, it’s over something modest, maybe a sentence spoken, sometimes something not spoken. The final conversation between son and parents, after which the narrator decides to change his phone number (we’re in the pre-cellular era), feels so small, hinging on one thing his father says, but it sits on a mountain of decades of lived experience.

The Anniversary won the Strega Prize, Italy’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – winners include The Leopard, The Name of the Rose, and The Solitude of Prime Numbers – this year, and comes out in English tomorrow. (I received a review copy from the publisher.) Like many other recent winners, it’s quite short, only 135 pages, and punches well above its weight thanks to its economy of prose. Bajani has crafted a scenario that feels specific yet applicable to so many families, real or constructed, where power imbalances or insufficient boundaries fester over time, and nobody makes a real move to change them because so many people are just conditioned to accept family, whatever it may look like.

I was probably predisposed to like the novel anyway, given my affinity for Italian literature, but The Anniversary is superb. It’s incisive, thoughtful, and, despite its bleak subject, gripping right to the end.

Next up: Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent, one of the nominees for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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→ August 24, 2026
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Enchanted Ivy.

Packing a series of puzzles into its small box, Enchanted Ivy is easily one of the best pure solo games I’ve ever played. Coming from first-time designer Sarah Joshua, the game presents you with a seemingly simple challenge – build your tableau of ivy cards while placing guests on half of them in a way to maximize your scoring – that becomes increasingly difficult because of how well-designed those guests’ scoring methods are.

The gist of Enchanted Ivy is simple. Each ‘chapter’ presents you with a pattern of cards and a set of guests you’ll use in that game. On every turn, you’ll draw two cards, playing one with its door side and one with its ivy side (they’re called balconies and walls, but I don’t think those names are that intuitive), and will place one of the two guests in your hand on the door you just played. You’ll then draw a new guest from the bag and begin the next turn. You also begin the game with one bonus door that you can place on an ivy card at any point for 3 extra points, although it may end up costing you points on a nearby guest card. At game end, you must have played your cards in the pattern shown, and then you will score every guest according to their wishes.

That’s the whole game, although there are additional doors you can earn as you move through the campaign to get some extra powers. (I have only obtained the first one so far, and it’s quite useful). You can learn this game inside of five minutes, but playing it well enough to reach either the minimum victory score or the higher score for mastering the level is quite difficult, as the guests nearly all work against each other, and they tend not to appear from the bag when you need them, but whenever they feel like it. Jerks.

Each chapter also offers two additional bonus conditions that make winning it more difficult, but allow you to place stickers on a cardstock page of shelves; when you complete a shelf, which requires at least three stickers, you gain the associated bonus door. You don’t have to do those, but I wouldn’t want to pass up the additional abilities you get from those, and those stretch goals – see what I did there? – give chapters more replay value.

Enchanted Ivy’s design is extremely tight, in the best possible way. You have only a few options on each turn: which card to play ivy-side up, which of the two guests in your hand to use, and where to place the two cards within the pattern that chapter dictates. Once a card is placed, it’s there for the game, so you may get locked into a decision early in the game that costs you points – maybe a lot of points – later in the game. Some chapters have more ornate patterns, such as including gaps between cards, which make some guests happier and others quite irked. (Many of the guests are Garbo-esque, as they want to be let alone.) The first two chapters include scarecrows, inert guests who can help others score but are worth zero points on their own.

Because there’s so much randomness involved in the card and guest draws, you can play a chapter multiple times, to boost your score or just see how it goes with different sequences. The base game comes with eleven chapters, including the teaching game in the prologue, while there’s an expansion (which I haven’t played) already with three more chapters and some new guests. It’s going to take me plenty of plays to exhaust what’s here in the base game. My only quibble is that it’s a bit of a table hog for a solo game, at least if you want to have the guests’ scoring cards – which are beautifully rendered, but large – out on display while you build your tableau. Among purely solitaire games I’ve tried, Enchanted Ivy has only one rival for the top spot, Coffee Roaster, which has a better theme for me, while Enchanted Ivy is a more elegant design. So where’s the Wrigley Field tie-in? Enchanted Ivy is an A- game, and I’m not really sure if I could ever actually give a solitaire game a pure A anyway.

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→ August 20, 2026
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Crashed Out.

Crashed Out is a new $10 card-shedding game with a memory component as well as some hidden cards, playing very quickly and allowing for a little strategy because many of the cards in the deck either have immediate effects when discarded or allow you to ignore them if you collect enough. It’s a little similar to Cabo and the Silver series, but plays faster, and sits more on the bridge between a card game and a party game than those titles do.

The goal in Crashed Out is to have the lowest total value of your cards when the game ends, so most of the time you’ll be trying to replace high-valued cards or cards of unknown value with low-valued cards. The game ends when one player decides they’re good with their cards and says “Crash Out!” or when any player discards the single value-20 card in the deck.

You begin the game with six cards face-down in front of you in two rows of three. You can look at the first row before you, but just once. On each turn, you draw a card from the deck, and choose to discard it or to keep it and discard any other card from your tableau, in which case you reveal the discarded card. If the card you discard is a 6, 7, 8, or 9, you must take the action shown on the card: 6 lets you draw a card and put it face-down in front of an opponent, 7 and 8 allow you to peek at any card in front of any player (including you), and 9 lets you swap one of your cards with an opponent’s.

If you discard a card and you have one or more matching cards in your tableau, you can discard those as well – and so can other players, even though it’s not their turn. If, however, you discard a card that doesn’t match, you take it back and draw another card, without looking at it, as a penalty.

The deck has cards valued from 0 through 12, 15, and the lone value-20 card. Cards 0 through 9 always count towards your total points at game-end. The cards valued 10 through 12 also count for their face values unless you have a set or three or more, in which case they all cancel each other out.

If a player is satisfied with their cards, they can call “Crash Out!” to end the game, after which each other player will get one more turn. The player who called the end takes the Shield card, so other players can’t give them new cards or swap cards out on those final turns. However, if someone discards the 20 card, whether or not they did so deliberately, the game ends immediately.

The result is a game that’s very fast-moving, offers a little bit of strategy, and gives you the social aspects of surprise moves, take-that tactics, and the occasional mistake. I’m not a party-game person in general because most party games are kind of dumb, especially ones that try to make you cringe, or that rely on inane questions. Crashed Out is a party-adjacent game that makes you think, as if someone took Scout or the aforementioned Cabo and reimagined them as highly social instead. It’s a grade B+ game for me, which is about as high as I’ll go on anything that bills itself as a party game.

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→ August 10, 2026
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The Killing Moon.

Before she became the N.K. Jemisin, first Black woman to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel and first author to win that award in three straight years, she was an acclaimed but at least less-known author of sci-fi and fantasy novels and perhaps better known for her speech standing up to the Christian nationalist shithead Theodore Beale, a.k.a Vox Day, who was so mad about it he later tried to blow up the Hugos entirely. Then Jemisin published The Fifth Season and became a literary superstar, quite deservingly so, putting the focus squarely on her writing output.

The Killing Moon is one of her five pre-Hugo novels, a work that stands alone but that came with a sequel published a month later (The Shadowed Sun), forming the “Dreamblood Duology.” Reading it now, it’s easy to see the seeds that eventually grew into Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and in some ways it features even stronger character development than those three novels worked into their vast plotlines, producing a book that’s lighter thematically but incredibly fun and gripping to read.

The Killing Moon takes place mostly in two rival cities, beginning in Gujaareh, where power is shared between the Prince, who succeeded his father to the throne, and the clergy of the Hetawa temple, who practice magic powered by dreams called narcomancy. Some clergy members known as Gatherers can enter dreams and reap “dreamblood,” which is an extremely powerful substance with addictive properties, while they can also guide dying people gently into death – or kill those the temple has deemed ‘corrupted.’

The story follows Nijiri, a young acolyte in the temple who becomes the protégé of an elder Gatherer named Ehiru, who is dealing with a spiritual and professional crisis after losing his focus during a gathering and failing to capture the target’s soul, leading to its destruction; and the ambassador from the neighboring city of Kisua, Sunandi, who visits Gujaareh in her professional capacity but becomes the target of an assassination plot involving Ehiru and Nijiri. The three of them begin to work together to unravel the conspiracy behind this scheme, to determine who or what is harvesting souls in Gujaareh beyond the purview of the Temple, and to stop a potential war between the two cities.

Jemisin creates a rich world here where religion, politics, and human frailty combine to create a world of deep uncertainty, where there are no clear ‘good guys’ and even our heroes are suspect. She reveals the mystery, or at least most of it, to the reader before the characters figure out what’s happening, so it’s not purely a mystery, but there is a mysterious element beyond the mere fantasy setting, where it isn’t clear who is actually pulling the strings – and why. The trio of heroes divide and conquer, moving to Kisua and then back to Gujaareh, even as Ehiru finds himself fighting a dark force inside of him that would make him a weapon for the very people he’s trying to unmask.

Jemisin does something interesting with religion in the plot of The Killing Moon that I haven’t seen before, at least not this effectively. Religion in this world is both a tool for succor and spiritual enlightenment and a tool of oppression, control, and self-enrichment. It is a balanced, honest portrayal of the role of religion in the last few hundred years of human civilization. I was tempted to say she comes out on the negative side of the ledger – it is certainly easier to interpret it that way if you weight the evil done by and through religion in this book more heavily than the kindnesses and solace it provides – but decided that was ultimately my own bias at play.

Although it certainly seems like Jemisin wrote the two novels as a single story, given their publication dates, The Killing Moon has a clear and decisive ending – and an extremely satisfying one that gets the right characters into the right positions, without relying on something beyond the worldview she’s created. Nijiri gets a proper end to his hero’s journey, more than Sunandi does, with a clear arc that takes him from the innocent apprentice to a man worthy of rising to the inner-circle status of his mentor. It made me want to read the second book, without actually needing to do so to complete the story.

Next up: I’m past the halfway point in this year’s winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel, Stephen Graham Jones’ horror novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

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→ July 21, 2026
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Big Fan.

Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur wrote a book together. It’s called Big Fan: Two Frieends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love. If you have listened to their podcast, or read their writing, you know exactly what this book is going to be like. Reading it was like listening to a six-hour conversation between the two of them with occasional guest stars. I am also probably in the innermost circle of their target audience, not least because I know both of these knuckleheads, to the point where I am, in one paragraph, one of those guest stars. (They identify many of those one-graf guests by first name and occupation, which sometimes works to obscure who it is, but sometimes you get “Patton is a Comedian.”)

The general premise of Big Fan, which is the tiny bit of glue holding together a bunch of comical dialogues between these guys and a few of those guests, is that they’re exploring what it means to be a real fan of something, while also taking some of the longest and weirdest road trips possible. There’s a trip to Fairbanks, Alaska, for the Midnight Sun Game, which I have actually never attended in 25 years in the industry. They go to a darts championship, which sounds a lot more fun than I imagined. They have a pretty incredible experience going to an Unrivaled game. Joe makes Mike go to a WWE event that ropes in Jen Statsky, co-creator of Hacks, maybe my wife’s favorite show ever. Mike makes Joe play pickleball, which Joe (like my friend Will Leitch) claims to hate with the fire of ten thousand suns, something I don’t understand because pickleball is very fun and also good exercise for old people, which all four of us are. Dink. Dink. Whoops, you’re in the kitchen.

There’s a good bit of a lot of sports in there, obviously, and if there were nothing in the book but these two guys’ observations on sports, it would be great. I would gladly watch any real sporting event – not professional wrestling, sorry, that is pretend – with those two guys just to hear them riff. Maybe they could offer a real-time alternate feed to the World Series so I don’t have to listen to John Smoltz. I don’t need analysis of the game; I need to hear two people who are enjoying the game, and who let that come across in their chatter. They would be the anti-Smoltz. (Or anti-Lalas, as I was just exposed to that guy’s vapidity again today. He makes an inflatable doll seem like an intellectual giant.)

They also know a lot of people – I mean, a lot of people – and there are a couple of fantastic cameos in the book, not including mine. Tom Hanks wrote the intro, and I could probably just stop there. Linda Holmes explains her rebirth as a Phillies fan because of the likability (and success) of the current roster. Joe gets on the ice with the Shibutanis. They leverage knowing people into hugging Mookie Betts. Brandon McCarthy appears in transcripts of a group chat the three of them have. And those interstitials with the first name/vocation include a lot of famous and not-famous people talking about what they’re fans of and why.

It is a hoot, and I’m not just saying that because 1) they sent me a copy of the book and 2) I know both of them, and would at least like to remain on good terms with them, lest Mike create a character named Leith Kaw and make him a serial killer or, worse, a private equity bro in a future series. Big Fan is good fun, and it was just what I needed in the weeks leading up to the draft.

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→ July 20, 2026
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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Part story of the genocide in Gaza, part scathing critique of Western culture, and part memoir, Omar El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This should be required reading in every American high school. It lays utterly bare the emptiness of American imperialist thinking, the ‘special’ relationship our governments have always had with Israel, and our willingness to look the other way when the deaths of others disturb or inconvenience us.

El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up there and in Qatar before moving to Canada, and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago. He worked for many years for The Globe and Mail, and prior to this had written two novels, but no non-fiction books. It reads as if he has been saving up his rage, his indignation, his despair for decades so that he could pour it out on to nearly every page of this slender book of under 200 pages. It is a damning, heartbreaking read, rendered in extremely human language.

The main throughline of One Day is Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, which El Akkad refers to as “the world’s first live-streamed genocide,” the last a word he uses often and with plenty of justification. Indeed, the west’s fear of using that word, which extends to its media and political leaders of both U.S. parties, is also a major subject in the book, because, unlike any previous genocide (including the one that is likely happening right now in Sudan), we have visual evidence, we have videos and audio recordings, we have witness testimonies from people who were there and survived, and from people who were there and did not, but whose testimonies made it out.

El Akkad minces no words for the pusillanimous pundits who bothsides their way around the conflict, or for those who seek to dehumanize Palestinians. He points to the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman’s comparison of various Arab groups to spiders and caterpillar larvae (the U.S., of course, was a lion), the Times of Israel’s Luciano Mondino saying that Palestinian children “are the explosives of the future,” and the Israeli “Defence” Minister who called Palestinians “human animals.” Palestinians, Arabs in general, or just all brown people are still seen as something less, as the savages who simply can’t understand democracy or the rules of war or western civilization, such as it is, where we attacked an entire country that had nothing to do with 9/11, simply because 9/11 happened and the people who did it looked sort of similar. Yet after Hamas’ terror attacks and the massacre of October 7, 2023, when a single, unsourced story about murdered Israeli babies appeared online and then in major newspapers, even earning a mention by President Trump, even though the story was a hoax. It was seen by tens of millions of people, at the least, and I’m going to go on a limb and say that few of them stuck around to read the correction.

He does condemn Hamas, and describes their barbarous acts of October 7 in appropriate language, while also asking why it is that all people of Arab descent are expected to condemn terror attacks by Arab or Muslim groups, while white people are not expected to do the same – are called antisemitic and threatened with consequences if they do condemn – when Israel bombs a hospital or an aid convoy, or blockades Gaza so no food or medical aid can reach the starving population. He brings receipts; when Canadian protestors scaled Mt Sinai hospital in Toronto and flew a Palestinian flag, Canadian leaders condemned it and called hospitals sacred places of healing. They did not condemn Israel for bombing such sacred places of healing in Gaza.

Within the broader framework of the Gaza genocide and the ongoing failure of American imperialism, El Akkad also gives glimpses of his own life story. He remembers Egyptian security forces, barely adults, stopping his father after curfew, tearing up his security papers, and trying to arrest him, only for his father’s boss to happen upon the scene and save him – maybe saving his life. He remembers life in Doha, Qatar, which was exploding with newfound wealth thanks to the oil deposits beneath the tiny peninsula, and imported laborers to build up the city, often in near-slavery conditions, with no rights, no freedoms, and no way out. He also explores the environment of the last two years in the writing world, where may writers have declined to use their platforms to call for an end to the genocide, and where enough did speak out that PEN America had to cancel its 2024 awards ceremony because so many winners and nominees withdrew. He points out that the cost, perhaps fewer books sold, a cancelled appearance here or there, pales compared to the costs borne by the victims of genocide. One person’s words will not stop an attempt to extinguish a people, but enough people’s words, spoken together, might.

While El Akkad was writing the book, the war on Gaza entered its third year, and he notes that our attention had moved elsewhere. Yes, there is more sentiment in the U.S. electorate now that we should not be funding Israel’s efforts, and a few more elected officials and candidates are speaking out, but media coverage of the assault on Gaza has waned. We can only stare at misery for a few minutes before our eyes glaze over and we choose to look elsewhere.

One day, he points out, this will end, either because someone will stop Israel from wiping out the people of Gaza, or they will succeed to the point that there are too few Gazans left to matter. At that point, we will all have to reckon with what we did and said, if we did or said anything, to explain it to our children, our grandchildren, to ourselves. How does one finish the sentence, El Akkad asks, “it is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…” He has no answer. Neither do I.

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→ June 29, 2026
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The Score.

Multiple people suggested C. Thi Nguyen’s book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game to me this spring, but I was way ahead of them, putting a hold request in at my library the week it came out. It is a book about games, although it is much more a book about philosophy and the modern world, and touches on games – good and bad – as a way to address how we are manipulated into pursuing goals or acting certain ways by the rules that other people or corporate entities set up to manage us.

Nguyen’s premise is that we are all, to some degree, playing other peoples’ games – passively choosing to do things that do not fulfill us or help us achieve our goals or just make us happy, because we are instead following what amount to scoring systems in all aspects of our lives. The simplest example is the pursuit of greater income over all else at work: If money is what truly makes you happy, then maybe that’s the right game to be playing, but for most people, money isn’t everything (once you have enough to meet your basic needs), and for nearly all people, there are diminishing returns to making more money, unless you’re a psychopath who needs to make more money than anyone else, in which case you are playing a different game as well.

Perhaps the most salient and accessible example Nguyen gives is health. The rise of personal health devices – I owned a Fitbit for about five years before I got sick of how they died every year and a half or so and became trash – has led owners or wearers to judge their health along a few specific scales, such as weight, BMI, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and so on. None of these is an actual measure of health, and Nguyen points out that even defining what it means to be “healthy” in a global way is difficult at best, and probably impossible to operationalize in a practical sense.

Nguyen also discusses social media, even though he appears to be a very scant user – or perhaps he’s simply following his own advice. I recently hit 6000 followers on Instagram, a rather paltry number, and the app told me to celebrate it and gave me a graphic to share (I did not). Is the point of using Instagram, or any social media app, to amass likes or followers? I would argue it is not. Yet the rules of their particular game, in Nguyen’s framework, say that that is the point – this is how you measure success on Instagram, and therefore you should act accordingly. I gained followers particularly because of two videos I posted, one criticizing MLB’s proposal to the union, the other criticizing UNC’s head coach for abusing the arm of an 18-year-old pitcher on his staff. So should I post more critical videos to try to stir the pot and gain more followers and likes? Reader, I will not. That would be playing someone else’s game.

The Score is incredibly light and easy to read, certainly the most accessible philosophy or philosophy-adjacent book I’ve ever read. (It beats the pants off Sophie’s World.) The chapters are short, and most chapters are built around short anecdotes, many taken from Nguyen’s own life – I respect and appreciate how many quirky interests he has, some of which align with my own, like board games and cooking, and some of which don’t, like rock climbing (go around it) and yo-yo tricks (which I didn’t know was still a thing).

There isn’t much mention of specific games in The Score, which was a little disappointing because they would have provided some more specificity for Nguyen’s examples. He does mention The Mind for its elegance – it has a very short rule set, yet is very fun and offers significant replayability – and a few video games he likes, as well as the fact that he lost many hours to playing the original Civilization video game in college, which happened to me as well (fall of junior year … I was thoroughly addicted to it). I thought he might get more into the gamification phenomenon, where companies use various techniques like points, rewards, leaderboards, competition among friends or strangers, and so on to encourage users to engage in some specific behavior. Duolingo is gamified language-learning. I have mixed feelings on it; about two years of daily use got me to a very basic level of conversational Welsh, and I’ve been using it for German for the last nine months, where I’m probably also at basic conversation as long as you can forgive my incorrect word order. Verb at the end I get, but the rules for the stuff in the middle … well, Duolingo doesn’t teach that kind of material, because it can’t be as easily gamified. So am I learning languages, or playing a game about learning languages?

You don’t need to be a gamer of any sort to read and gain something from The Score, and to the extent that they’re marketing it as a book about games, that’s a mistake. This is a book about life; I’d call it a self-help book if that term didn’t have pejorative connotations. Nguyen subtly lays out how to figure out when you’re being played by someone who wants you to play their game, and then how to find the games, literally but more figuratively, that you do want to play, actions that will help you be happier and find fulfillment, whether it’s in your family, at work, or in your many hobbies. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re too online like I am, and could use a reminder that every app and algorithm is trying to sucker us into playing their games, so the answer is to log off and play something else instead.

Next up: I just finished Big Fan by my friends Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur and began Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw.

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→ June 5, 2026
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Waddle.

I did not know that a group of penguins is called a waddle until I encountered the small-box board game Waddle, published by Allplay, last year at Gen Con. It’s one of the best games Allplay has produced, playing 2 to 5 but best with at least 3, and is great value at $19. (It’s $24 on amazon for some reason, but $19 direct from Allplay, or $26 for the base game and the three-in-one expansions.)

In Waddle, you’ll place your penguins on the white ice hexes on the modular board adjacent to the blue water hexes, which form fishing ponds of varying sizes. You only score points in two ways in Waddle, which is something of a relief: you score for every waddle of penguins you create, and you score for having the most or sometimes second- or third-most penguins around a pond with at least one fish (scoring icon) on it. So there’s some pattern-building and some classic area control, with very quick turns.

On your turn you either can place one of your penguin tokens, most of which show one penguin but two of which show a pair of penguins, or ‘scout ahead,’ passing your turn to move up in the turn order for the next pond. Once you’ve build the modular board, you find the pond with the white number 1 on it, and players begin placing penguins on open white hexes around it, going in turn order. Play moves to the pond with next number once all hexes around the current one are filled with penguins.

If you would rather jump ahead in turn order for the next pond, you can scout ahead, taking your marble off the current turn order track and moving it to the next track, either at the bottom or behind any players who’ve already scouted ahead. If you are the last player with a marble on the current track, however, you must place penguins on all open white hexes around the current pond before play can continue. (Single penguin tokens are considered unlimited, so you can’t run out.)

There are twenty pond tiles with numbers on them, and play progresses through them in ascending order, although you may skip some because there are no open hexes adjacent to them by the time you get there. Once you’ve finished pond 20, all white spaces should have penguins on them, and you begin the scoring. Your waddle is worth anywhere from 1 point for a single penguin all by its lonesome to 36 points for a waddle of 8 or more penguins; there’s a table on each player aid card, but for the math-inclined among you, the number of points for a waddle of size N is the sum of all integers from 1 through N. Double penguin tokens count as 2 penguins for both scoring methods.

Then you check each pond with yellow points icons and look at all white hexes surrounding the entire pond. The player with the most penguins around it gets the number of points shown on the highest icon in the pond. If there are multiple fish/scoring icons, then the player with the second-most penguins gets the second-highest points total, and so on, until you’ve either scored all of the fish or each player has scored once. All ties are ‘friendly,’ so ties players get the full amount shown.

There are a couple of rules tweaks for playing with two players, but that player count kind of obviates the scout-ahead mechanic, and I don’t think Waddle is nearly as good without at least three. It sings at four or five, though, as there’s a ton of competition and you can often find a move that helps you and blocks someone else, and with turns this quick you can play with five and never get bored. Allplay promises a one-minute teach and that’s about right – I think I described every single rule in this review, and you don’t need all of those details to get started.

I’ve played nine of the games in Allplay’s Small Box Big Game series, with one more on my Shelf of Shame (9 Lives), and I’d put this near the top. It might be second, behind Sail; I think Sequoia is a real sleeper, but I’m one of its bigger fans, I think. I would even put Waddle over Mountain Goats, which is good but I think has a limited ceiling. It’s a keeper for me, and the best game Allplay put out in 2025.

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→ June 4, 2026
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Mood Machine.

Music journalist Liz Pelly has spent most of her professional life working and living in indie music circles, which gives her a distinct and important perspective on the consolidation of the music industry around just a few streaming services, with Spotify foremost among them. In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, she explores the birth of Spotify, how it took over the streaming space, and how pernicious its effects have been on indie musicians and labels – as well as listeners who want to hear anything but the most anodyne music available.

Spotify began as an idea to sell ads, not as a way to save the music industry, or even just as a way for its founders, including the military-minded Daniel Ek, to get rich while working in music. Songs were just a vehicle for selling ads and collecting user data to do so more effectively. Ek and other Spotify execs have retconned their history to make Spotify out to be some kind of savior for music and musicians, even as their practices have proven predatory, including bringing back payola, and they’ve cracked down harder on musicians with tiny followings than they have on scammers posting fake music tracks and clips to try to deke Spotify’s algorithms and rack up streams from listeners who aren’t paying much attention to what’s playing.

Pelly spoke to over a hundred current and former Spotify employees, got access to internal Slack logs, and interviewed musicians, label executives, and others to research Mood Machine, and two consistent themes emerged (among many smaller topics). One is that Spotify’s entire structure, built largely around algorithmic playlists, which are made by machine-learning systems and are distinct from curated ones, assembled by humans, like the ones I post every month, is both corrupt and tends to funnel listeners to a small number of artists from major labels, while paying artists from outside of the big 3 labels a pittance (and paying no artists anything close to fair value). The second is that a huge portion of Spotify’s audience isn’t actually listening to the music: One of their main goals is to get listeners to stick on a playlist as some sort of background noise – similar to Netlix’s “second-screen” nonsense – and let it play for hours and hours, and if it runs out let Spotify’s algorithm just keep playing more songs, so they can serve more ads. Playing a song costs Spotify less than half a penny in royalties. Their dream scenario is The Lost Weekend except with some algorithmic chillwave playlist going in the background for 72 hours.

Harper’s excerpted a portion of Mood Machine in 2024 as a story called “The Ghosts in the Machine.” It exposed Spotify’s program to commission fake tracks from outside vendors under its “Perfect Fit Content” program, where those companies would supply songs by ‘ghost artists’ to pad Spotify’s playlists for deeply discounted royalty rates, allowing Spotify to deliver the same quantity of music to listeners for a lower cost. Spotify execs defended the practice, saying that listeners of those playlists were “half-listening anyway,” so why deliver them real music? Pelly spoke to a number of employees dismayed by the practice, saying it was unethical to deceive listeners and harmful to the music industry they were supposedly supporting. The few editors remaining who curated playlists themselves reported increased pressure to use these ghost artists on their playlists, even though that was antithetical to their mission (and, I would presume, their music fandom). Some of the companies Pelly cites as ghost-artist producers are now getting into AI-generated tracks, such as Epidemic Sound, which also sells royalty-free background music to video producers. It’s the most interesting chapter in a book that’s full of them, and the most overt explanation of why Spotify is harmful to the music industry.

Pelly wraps up with a chapter (not the epilogue) about how listeners can support artists better in the streaming era. The obvious answer – and I’m not criticizing Pelly here – is to buy music. You love an album? Pay for it, whether digitally or physically. Buy it direct from the label or from the artist. Going to shows and buying merch helps as well. Streaming an artist’s music barely makes a dent; you’d have to stream a song around 300 times to get them $1. She points out that while Spotify is generally presumed to have the worst payout rates to artists – no one knows because Spotify’s agreements with major labels are confidential and protected by NDAs, which seems like maybe a restraint of trade, but I’m not a lawyer – the other major streaming sites, like Apple and Amazon, aren’t that much better. I don’t believe she ever said not to stream music, but her message is more like “stream responsibly, and buy liberally.”

The book is so thoroughly researched, with citations as well as quotes from relevant sources, that it can bog down a little in the details, but I will gladly accept that tradeoff to get such an academic take on a popular topic. It is easy to find reasons to hate streaming and find people to tell you they hate streaming. It is a much harder task to explain just why streaming is bad for music, and culture, and explain why it’s also going to be hard to fix the problems streaming, and Spotify in particular, has created. Mood Machine does all of this, without once allowing you to forget that the reason you downloaded Spotify in the first place was because you, in fact, like music.

Next up: Susan Choi’s Flashlight. Dun dun, dun dun dun.

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→ June 1, 2026
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Sorrowland.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindess of Ghosts was a marvel of ingenious plotting and superb character development, using its generation ship as a setting without excessive focus on its mechanics, instead exploring racial caste systems through the literal stratification of its residents across higher and lower decks by skin tones. Their second novel, Sorrowland, shifts its setting to a modern-day gothic milieu, following a queer Black woman who escapes from a Christian cult’s compound in California, only to find the real world inscrutable and inhospitable to her and her two infant children.

Vern Riley was raised at in the Blessed Gardens of Cain, which began as a sort of Black autonomy movement but morphed, as cults often do, into something more insidious when one man took control of the group and converted it into a cult of personality, complete with control regimens and isolation from the outside world. Vern was even forced to marry that first leader’s son, Reverend Sherman, who took over when his father died and continues to suppress the group’s members, including strapping all cult members down while they sleep. She flees one day while pregnant, giving birth to twins in the woods near the compound, beginning a flight that will take her across multiple states, exposing her to a civilization she barely knows or understands, before her eventual return to try to liberate those still in Sherman’s grip – including her mother and brother – and the exposure of the malevolent forces propping up the entire endeavor.

There is a lot going on in Sorrowland, to put it mildly, from the obvious exploration of racism and racial stratification in American society, as well as religion’s role as a tool of oppression, to allusions to the Black power movement and to government efforts to fight it like COINTELPRO. The Blessed Gardens of Cain may be a Black cult, but there are parallels to the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, the last of which received significant press attention when two women who escaped told their stories in a new book. (The temporal precedence is backwards, but the cult Solomon envisioned sounds a hell of a lot like the ACMTC.)

The book could easily have been weighed down by all of its meaning and metaphor, but Solomon gives the readers a compelling, complex protagonist in Vern, who pairs extreme innocence in the ways of the outside world (and the people in it) with strong survivalist skills honed in her time in the cult. She’s on the run almost immediately, first from what she believes is a demon chasing her in the woods, and later from enforcers associated with the cult trying to track her down. She does all of this with two infants and later toddlers in tow – the novel skips ahead in time at several points – giving the whole novel an adventure/horror vibe to keep it moving; every time I thought the story would bog down in its seriousness, something would happen to keep the pace moving.

Sorrowland is still a gloomy read – I can’t say the title didn’t warn me – as Vern runs into obstacle after obstacle, seldom of her own making, and even the denouement only provides partial satisfaction, although I’d argue a fully happy ending would have been unrealistic and out of sync with the remainder of the book. Solomon also explains some of the more mysterious events of the plot with a clever detail, the one bit here that takes this novel into the world of science fiction, although again those elements are there in service of a broader point.

I still prefer An Unkindness of Ghosts, as that book’s protagonist Aster Gray was even stronger than Vern and the mystery within that book was even more compelling, although Solomon set a high bar for their next novel to clear. (They also wrote a novella in between the two called The Deep, a collaboration with Daveed Diggs’ rap trio clipping.) That novel also had better pacing, perhaps because it seemed to try to tackle fewer serious themes, with Sorrowland a more ambitious work. This book was one of two winners of the Otherwise Award in 2021, given to sci-fi or fantasy works that explore or expand our understanding of gender; explaining how Sorrowland does so might risk spoiling some of its secrets, but it’s a worthy honoree that also gets into queer themes and how Vern’s journey is even further complicated by her intersectionality. That Solomon could take something this dark and still make it an exciting read is a testament to their talent as storyteller.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air.

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